Re: [Caml-list] Thoughts on targeting windows

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>]

Indeed! I forgot about that last little bit.  We killed most of the C,
but there's a bit left.  That said, those should be pretty portable,
and can (and have been) stubbed out so it can work in a Javascript
context.

y

On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Sebastien Mondet
<sebastien.mondet@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:
>>
>> Core_kernel is pure OCaml, and so should work fine on Windows (and
>> Javascript!)
>>
>
> Actually some dependencies of core_kernel have C code, like bin_prot:
> https://github.com/janestreet/bin_prot/blob/master/lib/blit_stubs.c
>
>
>
>>
>> y
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 11:23 AM, David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>
>> wrote:
>> > William wrote:
>> >> we are considering using OCaml for a rather large project,
>> >> the bulk of which will be networking and encryption. OCaml
>> >> seems to meet our needs with one exception: we'd like to
>> >> target windows (as well as linux & mac) and we got the
>> >> impression that this would be complicated -- we gathered
>> >> that neither jane street's Core nor OPAM are windows compatible.
>> >
>> > It's more complicated than Linux (& Mac), but not overly so.
>> >
>> >> Would still recommend using OCaml? Are there workarounds, or
>> >> other libraries that would replace Core?
>> >
>> > I believe Core_kernel aims to be the platform-neutral parts of core?
>> > There are other Jane Street libs which compile just fine on Windows.
>> > Batteries, as others have noted, works out of the box. Usually, I find that
>> > the biggest problem in third party libs is in build systems (becoming less
>> > so with Oasis, OCamlbuild and so on) making naïve decisions about Windows
>> > but that doesn't usually take much patching.
>> >
>> > Most of what I do is Windows-oriented, but some of what I've done is
>> > Windows and Linux. My experience is that it's important to keep Windows in
>> > the picture early on to avoid pain later - so ensure that daily builds are
>> > working on Windows or perhaps that one of your developers is always working
>> > on Windows or something... that should avoid accidentally selecting a
>> > Unix-only library and only realising that a painfully long way down the road
>> > (or that the library you thought was cross-platform contains an assert false
>> > for the function you need when running on Windows!). If you write something
>> > which works on Windows in OCaml it will probably translate with little pain
>> > to Linux but the reverse isn't necessarily true.
>> >
>> > While OPAM is great, I personally find that downloading and compiling a
>> > library, even by hand, represents an insignificant amount of time compared
>> > with reading its documentation, evaluating its samples and so on in the
>> > overall process of working out whether I want to use a component... but
>> > apparently the pain of not having a package manager really, really, really
>> > hurts people coming from the Unix world ;o)
>> >
>> > HTH,
>> >
>> >
>> > David
>> >
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>